Partial Discharge Pattern Recognition of Molded Type Transformers Using Self Organizing Map

In this paper, application of self organizing map (SOM) to recognize partial discharge (PD) patterns of molded type transformers (MTTs) is proposed. The PD patterns are measured by using a commercial PD detector. A set of features, used as operators, for each PD pattern are extracted through statistical tools. The proposed SOM classifier has the advantage of high robustness to the ambiguous patterns, which is useful in recognizing the PD patterns of electrical transformers. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the classifier was tested on 120 sets of field-test PD patterns of MTTs. The test results show the proposed approach may achieve a quite satisfactory recognition of PD patterns